In January, the Chrome browser disabled third-party cookies for 1% of users to permit Privacy Sandbox testing, sparking a new debate.
This minor modification sparked a significant issue among DSPs, who began to observe IDs – what looked to be third-party cookies on Chrome – being used to transmit what should have been an empty field, known as “ID bridging.”
Vendors and publishers were outraged by the practice of replacing OpenRTB buyer IDs with new ones when cookie data was unavailable.
Publishers and vendors noted that ID bridging has been taking place in Safari for at least a year. They, too, rely on revenue. From the buyer’s standpoint, publishers’ claims that the method considerably promotes monetization merely highlight how frequently advertisers pay for falsified IDs.
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“This was easily the most contentious working group conversation I have ever had,” Hillary Slattery, the IAB Tech Lab’s senior director of product management for programmatic, told AdExchanger, referring to internal debates over ID bridging.
And that’s saying something, she continued. Last year, Slattery headed the Privacy Sandbox Task Force and the video placement update, which was a hotly debated shift in how video units are classified.
The Tech Lab has pushed new protocols through the comment period, which are expected to go live later this year. These standards include new fields with information to expose bridging IDs and which manufacturers use them in the supply chain.
But there’s another reason why ID bridging has become such a contentious issue. It is the most obvious example to date of the programmatic ecosystem grappling with what constitutes “fraud.”
To back up, there is some disagreement about what constitutes an ID bridge.
Basis VP of Products Ian Trider, a noted author on several of the Tech Lab articles about ID bridging, defined it as when a publisher or publisher vendor checks to see if it can identify or classify a site visitor, even if the cookie ID field is nil.
In practice, this entails exploiting third-party cookies on Chrome, while they still exist, to identify a user in a cookieless environment, such as Safari. In some situations, an ID bridge results in an alternate ID being supplied in the bidstream to complete the blank third-party cookie field.
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However, whenever an ID is entered into the buyer ID box that is not the native browser cookie ID, “as far as I’m concerned, it’s a spoofed ID,” Trider stated.
“You can’t just say, ‘It’s related’ – that’s not how the ID field works.”
Trider’s point of view exemplifies the fact that ID bridging has become the most recent example of the industry grappling with how to define what is and is not fraud.
From the buy-side perspective, any ID bridging as it is frequently used may be considered fraud and should fall under the MRC categories of sophisticated invalid traffic. The supply side intentionally defrauds marketers by putting IDs where they do not belong.
There is a history of such programming abuse.
Years ago, mobile publishers and exchanges began injecting generic or random location data into the relevant OpenRTB field, as bids with location data were more valuable. And remember bid caching? The technique, which continues to this day, includes SSPs keeping an advertiser’s high bid for one impression and then just sending them a different, new impression at the same price.
Of course, there is a distinction between utilizing malware and a network of bot-populated sites to defraud advertising and engaging in morally dubious behavior that urges purchasers to open their wallets a little wider.
However, advertisers are afraid about being fooled in ways that cross the line because they have already been duped.
Buy-side platforms are tired of this nonsense, according to one DSP executive who was part in the ID bridging debates at the Tech Lab and requested anonymity because his company does not go on the record about this topic.
However, publishers believe that ID bridging is a legitimate option in the yield and monetization toolset.
“Publishers have spoken very positively about the ability for these [ID bridging solutions] to boost their monetization,” said Andrew Eifler, SSP TripleLift’s chief product officer (and new co-CEO).
Publishers are just scraping by right now, and programmatic technology normally benefits the buy side. That is where the money comes from, after all. A key use case for programmatic is allowing marketers to access valuable users, such as ESPN or Wall Street Journal visitors, on a smaller, more cheaper site.
According to the same unnamed DSP source, publishers, who are frequently disenfranchised, are given broad leeway by demand-side technology and advertisers to exploit the system in any way they see fit.
However, this can lead to a difficult tug-of-war about what constitutes fraud and what does not, with the question of purpose playing a significant role.
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In the instance of ID bridging, an SSP may be properly seeking to identify a user. (As opposed to targeting an IP address, which may identify everyone who works at the same company or who happens to be using the same coffee shop WiFi.)
That SSP might make a compelling case that adding alternate IDs increases campaign performance.
However, many consumers are skeptical about this rationale, owing in large part to how IDs function.
Inserting new IDs may interfere with campaign performance if conversions are ascribed to the incorrect ID. An advertiser may wind up retargeting a user it believes is likely to make a purchase, but in reality it is an unrelated person whose ID was erroneously bridged into the ID field.
Even if the seller or SSP isn’t cynically using ID bridging, it distorts an advertiser’s reach and frequency capping; for advertisers, ID bridging is difficult not to interpret as a workaround to frequency capping.
The updated OpenRTB specifications should help. They have completed the public comment period and are reaching the end of the fourth quarter.
The new specifications do not disable ID bridging, but they do allow advertisers to know where it occurs. The specifications include three new fields that indicate which firm produced the bridging ID, which vendor inserted the ID, and who performed the match. (It is possible, although not always, that the same seller will provide all three.)
“What gets lost in the ID bridging conversation is that these ID bridges are not necessarily bad for buyers, because they give them more transparency and choice,” TripleLift’s Eifler said about the new procedures.
If a vendor or publisher has its own first-party data set that an advertiser trusts to fill an empty ID field with a valid target, they can take advantage of the new ID bridging arrangement, according to Slattery. The goal is to provide advertisers the ability to choose which partners or methodology to trust.
Many publishers will suffer a significant revenue loss when the new OpenRTB specifications are issued and ID bridging becomes more difficult to do in the shadows. However, the additional fields still allow publishers to submit their own IDs.
The layout continues to irritate DSPs the most.
ID bridging offers a perverse incentive to position IDs that generate greater value, according to another DSP insider who requested anonymity on a problem his company would not discuss outside of the working group. Publishers or SSPs can continue to introduce IDs that they know are more valuable without having to go through the laborious process of obtaining a valid match.
This was a source of heated disagreement on the GitHub repo for the new OpenRTB standards until last week, when Slattery marked the public comment feedback boards as completed.
“Everybody had really big feelings about this for their own very legitimate business interests,” according to Slattery.
Despite months of difficult back-and-forth discussions, “I’m proud of where this ended up,” she stated.
“The way that I always try to go into compromises like these are that if one side ends up openly weeping and one side is laughing, that’s not a good compromise,” she told me. “The fact that both sides ended up shedding one single, solitary tear is a really good sign.”
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